Pádraig Naofa Saint Patrick

Amici, A Chairde,

I've been to St. Patrick's Purgatory in Loch Derg -- next to living among Irish speakers in the West, it's the best time I've ever had in my years in and out of Ireland and it has to be the most "Celtic" thing I've ever experienced, if I can put it that way. But then, I was praying in Irish the whole time, so perhaps no wonder, that.

As for our glorious Pádraig Naofa, there's no evidence he was consecrated as a bishop or even ordained as a priest. (He might well have been ordained a priest, at least. We don't know. His actual writings are all we have of him that has any certainty, and because of the way he wrote Latin, it is very hard to figure out what he's trying to say.) He certainly didn't come to Ireland with permission. From trying to read his Confession, an apologia pro vita sua work, it appears he wasn't much liked in his own country: post-Roman Britain. 

However, return to Ireland he did, and for love of the Irish people; his return to Ireland was on his own initiative and he wrote his Confession to defend himself doing so. Had his Confession and Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus not been found in an attic somewhere in the 7th century Armagh, he'd have been totally forgotten. But God wanted him remembered.

As it is, he's unique: the first Catholic missionary going intentionally outside the empire and a Latin author who who was never trained in proper, classical Latin, and thus wrote in the version of Latin he spoke at home. And perhaps he's the only saintly author (certainly from his time) who praised beautiful women, for he praised the beauty of Irish women.

He's unique: we've nothing like his writings anywhere, either in language or sentiment.

Amazing. A true hero of the Faith, and apostle to (at least the northern kingdoms of the ) Irish. He deserves far better than the farrago of a 'celebration' the U.S. Irish-Americans seem intent to annually inflict on him.

An Préachán